Paper ID #22598 STEMstory: integrating history of technology in science & engineering edu- cation Dr. Bruce Edward Niemi, Tulsa Community College Bruce Niemi taught history and political science at Tulsa Community College for many years. He served a term in the House of Representatives for the state of Oklahoma and has been active in several community and civic organizations. Dr. Niemi is married to the Honorable Judge Theresa G. Dreiling and is father of two daughters, Meredith and Julie Niemi. c American Society for Engineering Education, 2018 STEMstory: Integrating History of Technology in Science and Mathematics, Engineering, and Technical Education Abstract STEM students face general education requirements in humanities as a part of their degree programs. Many students believe these courses are of little value to their education and career goals. Policy discussions at all levels of government has politicized history education. History curriculum focusing on societal and political developments seems obscure to the high school or undergraduate STEM student. STEMstory focuses on engaging STEM students by examining history general education courses through the lens of history of technology. The study proposes curriculum for a U.S. history survey course focusing on progress in science and technology incorporating best practices in fusing liberal arts and engineering in curricular and co-curricular activities. The curriculum proposal includes innovative approaches that intentionally promote development of professional, non-technical skills and focuses on student retention. It supports efforts on and studies of integrating engineering with general education. The curriculum parallels coursework in U.S. history and includes units on: technology and culture, technology in early America, transportation and industrial revolutions, the Second Industrial Revolution, the communication revolution, technology in war and Depression, Age of Space and Science, the Information Age and biotechnology, and Romanticism, techno-phobia, and technology failures. History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does. … Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as the lunatic fringe. - John Edward Christopher Hill. Introduction How many teachers hear such comments from their students? The following remark by a graduate engineer with a successful career designing and constructing transmission lines for an Oklahoma electrical utility may sound familiar to many history and humanities professors: I always loved math and physics, where I have to remember just the basics and I can derive everything else with logical thinking. I mean, my memory is bad...I cannot remember all the dates and who came where, when etc. That is why; when I was a student, I hated history. I always thought why I would learn about what war was fought in what age and who did what when it has nothing to do with my life. The professional engineer went on to suggest, “You can make a difference if you tell it like its story so that it sticks in your mind, and makes it interesting.” For many years while serving as a history instructor at a community college I frequently heard similar statements from the best students in STEM fields. STEMstory Education has undergone a revolution in a generation. Many of us learned handwriting in grade school, read Dick and Jane primers, performed calculations on a slide ruler, studied mechanical drawing, and took vocational courses in carpentry, metalworking, or car shop. Teaching and learning today often happens online with advanced educational technology. Humanities and soft-skills have taken a backseat teaching to the test. CAD drafting systems produces renderings for projects. Standards-based education nearly obliterated vocational education in the late-20th century but CareerTech has reemerged today as pre-engineering, information technology, entrepreneurship, and culinary arts. The purpose of this paper is to present a new history curriculum incorporating the history of technology for STEM students at our community and technical colleges that speaks to their academic and career interests. The paper demonstrates how history of technology fulfills outcomes expected of our graduates, how technological achievements since the Scientific Revolution parallel our own United States history, and how history about invention and culture engages STEM students. This monograph provides a course outline with units that tell the story of technology. Finally, this paper presents data derived from when this curriculum was “test driven” as a part of a university philosophy and history of science. The curriculum proffered encourages community and technical colleges to incorporate such a course either as alternative to general education requirements for history or as a requirement for STEM graduates. STEMstory Rational for Research Renewed interest in STEM and Career-Technical Education In his 2015 State of the Union Address, President Obama described a Minneapolis couple, Rebekah and Ben Erler, and their journey out of the family’s economic difficulties in wake of the Great Recession. Their success, he said, was partly through retooling and career retraining at their local community college. The president called on Congress to lower the cost of community college to Zero so that two years of college becomes as free and universal in America as high school is today “for everybody who is willing to work for it.” His administration is continuing to emphasize STEM programs to educate scientists, engineers, and technicians for the purpose of renewing U.S. technological and manufacturing prowess. The STEM careers are the most competitive, pay out the most, and sustain the middle class American Dream while prolonging U.S. economic hegemony and rebuilding its industrial base and infrastructure [13], [24]. During the 2016, presidential primary season contenders for both the political parties’ nominations repeated an emphasis on career and technical education as a part of their education agenda. A Republican presidential aspirant sparked a debate among philosophy professors when he asserted, “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers [25].” Do STEM students “hate” history? Even within the social sciences, there is a bias against history. As these fields evolved from normative to behavior theory after World War II, they increasingly emphasized statistics, economics, and decision analysis. Dwight Waldo, a political scientist who played a defining role in modern public administration, remarked with regard to history: “. .public administration was born of the conviction that historical as well as legal studies of government are narrow, bookish, and sterile. .Why try to reconstruct the Roman administrative system – it failed, didn’t it [32], [8]?” What is the cause of students’ lack of interest in history? Why is a subject that fascinates pupils in fifth grade is found boring by senior year? Is it a situation prompted by the old joke that “half the history teachers in the nation have the same first name: ‘Coach’ [9]? Is it due to the prevalent high school history pedagogy consisting reciting names and dates on tests? Could it be to STEM students’ inclination to seek quietly for eternal truths about Nature, using Nature’s own incorruptible methods of disinterested experiment and incontrovertible mathematics? Alternatively, perhaps James Loewen’s [18] criticism of canonical American history, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong? For students the study of history is confusing because of historical problems with randomness, probability, and uncertainty, or as Donald Rumsfeld commented: …as we know, there are known knowns. These are the things we know. There are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know. And if STEMstory one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones [7]. Adding to student confusion are historians’ debates about what really happened. Both Napoleon and George Orwell agree, “History is written by the winners.” Accurate figures and objective accounts of what happened often do not exist. Each party in a historic controversy has its own version of the history it writes. Is it fact or is it propaganda? History on trial Adding to STEM learners’ confusion is the political conversations, or near wars, over history. Historian Alan Brinkley observed, “You can name virtually any field of history and find revisionists. There were New Deal revisionists, Lincoln revisionists, Eisenhower revisionists [4].” In 1994, the revisionists’ isolation sparked a sensational controversy over the proposed National History Standards, created by UCLA historians under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. The Standards sought to engage students with exciting materials allowing students “to exercise their own judgment… and understand that there are multiple perspectives [11].” That fall, before the UCLA researchers’ findings were published, the former NEH Chair, Lynne V. Cheney launched a preemptive strike in the Wall Street Journal’. Mrs. Cheney’s op-ed piece sparked an October Surprise firestorm just weeks before Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution. Throughout the ruckus, Mrs. Cheney maintained,